Misanthrope Girl

Following on from the launch of Inspiration Mars, billionaire Dennis Tito’s project to send a middle-aged couple on a non-stop a return trip to Mars, I had to wonder who my readership would want to send (involuntarily) on this trip.

Tony and Cherie Blair?
Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper?
Chris Hunhe and Vicky Pryce?
Neil and Christine Hamilton?
John Major and Edwina Currie
David and Victoria Beckham?

Or are these all people we’d like to send on a one-way trip?

The comments section is open for further suggestions…

Dear Mr Burbridge and Mrs Guthrie,

I am sorry to hear about the fate of your father, Wing Commander Bransome Burbridge. Alzheimer’s is a cruel thing to suffer and I hope his last days, however long they may be, are as comfortable as you can make them.

Your efforts to cover his care costs are commendable and the decision to turn down offers of help must have been a difficult one. However I do have one question for you both.

Assuming you are quoted accurately across the two articles in the Telegraph, we have the following quotes from the 26th:

Mr Burbridge said it is a shame they had to sell the medals but feel they had no option in terms of financing their father’s care.

“After his working life he doesn’t have that much [in savings] and it isn’t enough to cover the costs.

“We thought, as he is the person who won these decorations, it is only right he should benefit from them in some way while he is still alive.

“Our family wouldn’t want to sell them if he wasn’t going to benefit. We’re reluctant to do it but we believe it is the right thing.

“It’s a shame but we are quite philosophical about it.

“I don’t think there is some sort of huge debt he is owed. He was happy to do the remarkable things he did and he survived. We value him more than we do his medals.”

and this from the 27th:

He said other families were not lucky enough to have such memorabilia to help fund their relative’s care, with some forced to even sell their homes.

My apologies if I have got my facts wrong but it seems to me after reading these quotes that the one thing you value more highly than your father and his medals is the house he and his wife lived in before she died and he went into care. Could this be because it will be worth more to you once he dies than the sentimental value of his medals?

Yours,
Misanthrope Girl

The members of what passes for the Labour Party’s Brains Trust (no laughing, please) have finally, possibly, maybe, made some marks on that blank piece of paper and come up with a policy. Not a new one though but a rehash of an old one: a 10%* tax rate.

The details provided are sketchy but the press is reporting that it would apply to the first £1,000 of taxable income, in contrast to the previous incarnation which applied to the first £2,500.

However, whilst I am very much in favour of governments stealing less money, this ‘policy’ is about as pointless as when Millipede Sr and Dave Prentis called for the Living Wage.

As a result of this policy, basic rate taxpayers** would retain an extra £100 of their salary each year. Oh, be still my grateful heart!

The current government, as useless as they are, have raised the personal allowance (PA) from £6,475 in 2010/11 to £9,205 in 2013/14 – an Income Tax (IT) reduction for basic rate taxpayers of £546 a year.

Raising the PA to £12,070.50 (37.5 hr week at the National Minimum Wage) would save everyone a further £573.10 in IT alone.

Sorry Eds but this policy can only be described in one way: #fail.

Last night (and I assume also this morning), one of these images was causing outrage amongst the professional offended whilst the other went fairly much unnoticed.

Would anyone be able to explain to me why this should be the case without using the word ‘Murdoch’?

That the horse meat story is still going, long after the jokes got tired, is a source of bemusement. And whilst it may not be something that we Brits are used to eating, the French (and no doubt other nationalities) certainly are.

The problem as I see it is not so much that the meat is in the certain parts of our UK’s food supply but that someone has been lying about the provenance of it.

Wasn’t all of the legislation (both domestic and EU) which followed the BSE scare* designed specifically to prevent people not knowing where their meat was and where it came from?

Clearly another stunning success from big government…

Scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the US Fish and Wildlife Service compiled nationwide data from a number of local surveys and pilot studies, to conclude that cats are responsible for the deaths of up to 3.7bn birds and 20.7bn small mammals every 12 months, including mice, voles, rabbits and shrews.

Predators kill. Red in tooth and claw n’ all that.

The website Seeking Arrangement, which boasts of being ‘The Elite Sugar Daddy Dating Site for those Seeking Mutually Beneficial Relationships® & Mutually Beneficial Arrangements™’, has come under fire from that august body of men and women otherwise known as MSPs.

The site’s premise is simple enough: bringing together wealthy, usually older benefactors and cash-strapped younger adults on whom they can show their money. Think any aging celebrity with a young, attractive woman on their arm and you are there.

Why are the MSPs so interested?

The website revealed yesterday that the University of Edinburgh is the latest Scottish university to make it on to their annual “Top 20 Fastest Growing Sugar Baby Schools” in the UK.

It said there had been a 222 per cent increase in female student sign-ups from the university since April 2012, putting it in 8th place with 148 new members in the UK league table.

The university is one of three north of the Border on the list. The others are Glasgow Caledonian which is ranked fifth and St Andrews ninth.

Students finding ways other than taxpayer backed loans to cover the cost of their tuition? Excellent. Initiative isn’t completely dead yet then.

But, as mentioned, the politicians – a group always suspicious of voluntary arrangements between consenting adults – are going for the scare tactic:

Liz Smith, MSP, Scottish Conservative education spokeswoman said that such sites could put female students at risk.

“I do not think I will be alone in having deep-seated concerns about this. I am sure there will be many parents, members of staff and indeed many students themselves who will rightly be very wary of the approach of this type of website,” she said.

“Sadly, there have been other circumstances where the police have been called in to investigate similar website activity and there is clearly a matter of concern about the reported growth-rate of female students wanting to make use of these social networking sites.”

Labour MSP Neil Findlay, a member of the education committee, said: “The company may like to spin this as students ‘being proactive in pursuing a higher education but I am very concerned that this may take are more sinister turn.

“Young people may be vulnerable to older men who may have less than altruistic motives behind their apparent generosity. The reality is Mr Wade’s company is making money out of a system that could be putting young students in danger.”

Yes, something might go wrong for a small percentage of the students – but that is how life works. Your job, you useless fools, isn’t to protect people every single waking second of the day – regardless of how much you may think otherwise. The only role of the state has to play in this (given its current monopoly on law and order) is to get involved when harm is done.

Besides, I suspect the people more likely to get fleeced out of these arrangements are those putting up the readies.

h/t @Jock_Bastard

I was going to write something about the deluded Malthusian fool otherwise known as David Attenborough and his latest piece of twaddle but others managed to eviscerate his drivel before I got a chance to:

• Counting Cats
• Longrider
• The View from Cullingworth
• Tim Worstall

One of the goals of the anti-capitalist morons who occasionally fill the streets of developed world is an end to globalisation. Heck, the loonies in Green Party think that an end to globalisation is the route to prosperity for all. No, I don’t understand their logic either.

The silliness of the localisation idea was, at least to my mind, proven when I saw a piece in the FT during the week about the bread manufacturer Hovis:

Hovis, one of the UK’s top-selling breads, is to abandon its pledge to use only British wheat in its loaves following rain-blighted harvests.

Hovis will start using EU grain from this weekend. The move is another blow for UK farmers, who are already reeling from the relentless rains that made 2012 the second-wettest year on record and cost £1.3bn in agricultural damage and its aftermath.

[...]

The UK’s wheat yield fell by 14 per cent last year, according to the National Farmers Union. As a result, the country’s wheat imports are forecast to more than double to 2m tonnes. Since 2011 the price of bread has risen by 4.3 per cent, ahead of the 3.7 per cent rate for general food inflation.

That’s right, because last summer was so awful that the wheat harvest was almost one seventh down on 2011 the company has had to look elsewhere or reduce its output.

Now imagine a similar shortage across everything produced by UK farmers and no option to import any food stuffs from abroad…

Long live globalisation.

For many of us the first working day of the year has arrived and, like the inevitability of rain following a drought order, rail fares have increased.

As a rail commuter myself I am well aware of how depressing it is to see the cost of getting to somewhere (London in my case) go up year after year for no discernible benefit in terms of better, less crowded trains, nicer stations and shorter journey times.*

When I next renew my annual season ticket the cost to me will be £3,136 – an increase of just under 4.2%. On the face of it this seems a lot of money for what is approximately an 80 mile round trip to London five days a week.

But when you take a closer look it starts to become more reasonable. Thanks to that annual season ticket I get:

• Unlimited travel between my home station and London 363** days a year
• The ability to use any station between those two points without worrying if my ticket will cover it (handy for Lakeside, should I wish)
• One third off of any other rail travel (except Transport for London – but I have my PAYG Oyster for that)

Not convinced? Then let us, as the colonials are want to say, ‘do the math’…

The daily cost to me of this ticket is £8.64. Narrow it down to 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year and the daily rate is £12.06. Take out my holiday allowance and the remaining bank holidays and you are up to £13.40 a day.

Now take a common small car, a Fiesta say. Apparently it does about 50 miles to the gallon of petrol so let us run with that figure even though I suspect it would do a lot less if sat in rush hour traffic for several hours a day.

At 80 miles a day, or 400 miles a week, that is 8 gallons (36.39 litres) of petrol a week. Assuming an unleaded car with petrol at 131.9p/litre (the lowest figure for my area according to PetrolPrices.com) I will be spending pretty much £48/week on petrol. Still, it’s less than 5 days on the train.

But wait, I haven’t thought about parking and (if I’m unlucky) the congestion charge. Like most London office blocks we don’t have acres of parking space but unlike most we do have a private side street which I could use if I arrived early enough. It would still however cost me £8/day as it is inside the congestion charge zone. If I didn’t fancy chancing it I could try the NCP on the edge of the zone at £18/day.

At a minimum I’m looking at £88/week or £4,576 a year. If I end up in the NCP every day it’s £7,176 and if I have to pay the congestion charge as well I’m up to £9,256 – almost 3 times my rail fare.

So whilst the taxpayer subsidised (boo, hiss), government regulated fare I have to pay on what we laughingly call our privatised rail network is hardly cheap, unless it triples in price I’ll stick to using it as the alternative is horrendously expensive.

I could, of course, always sell up, move closer to London and cycle in thus saving myself my transport costs – and I will admit to considering the idea – but this is offset by a more expensive property, a higher council tax bill and the depressing thought of having a socialist (of the Labour variety) MP and council.

In end it is, like everything, a choice so whilst I might (and indeed do) grumble about the cost I know that the grass on the other side of the fence isn’t necessarily greener.